Red squirrel, run!

There is a red squirrel--perhaps there are several of him--
who is small enough to squeeze through the mesh
surrounding one of our bird feeders. He--perhaps he is a she--
sits in there, satisfied that there is a Bird Seed God,
stuffing himself until, when shooed away, he can barely
make it back out through the somehow-smaller mesh.

I am half-hearted in my shooing-away.
The little critter does me no harm, so far.
I have never understood squirrel hunters,
unless they provide food for someone,
or maybe just to discourage them
from opening a condominium in the attic.

"Red squirrel, run!" Joseph Langland wrote.
"The fixed ideas are coming to hunt you down!"

It is the fixed ideas that worry me.

Listening to the current noise about providing health care
makes it plain that the fixed ideas are hunting us down.

Take, for instance, the fixed idea that anything socialist is bad.
By any rational or sensible understanding of what it means,
our Medicare and Medicaid programs are socialist.
So is our military, our police and fire departments, our public
schools and most of our universities. Social Security is socialistic.

Society can, and ought, to do some things either because
private enterprises or individuals cannot do them,
or cannot be trusted to do them. Banks cannot be trusted
to tend to the public good without government oversight.
Our financial markets have just demonstrated, too,
that left to their own devices, they will not protect the common good
nor, for that matter, even their own good. They self-destructed.
Government had to bail them out, just as it had to bail out
General Motors and Chrysler. The Reagan-Bush years
have demonstrated that private armies (Blackwater, etc.)
are a terrible way for a nation to exert its influence and power.

But, even so, people chant that government is bad,
that government cannot do anything well, and that
private enterprises are always preferable to public ones.

That is just nonsense! It is a fixed idea,
and it is hunting us down! It is like going squirrel hunting
every autumn because it is just what we do.

The same people who want Medicare, and an army,
and Social Security, and government-insured bank accounts
repeat blather about what works, and what does not.

We have private enterprise medical care now.
It is the insurance companies that ration medical care.
It is our present system that leaves millions of people
without care, even though our present system costs us
about twice as much as any other nation on earth.
Our child mortality rates are higher than about
thirty other advanced nations. But people continue to say
that we have the best health care in the world.

(If you are covered. If you work for a big company.
If you are in Congress. If you are rich. If you ignore
anything that contradicts your fixed ideas.)

"Red squirrel, run! The fixed ideas are coming to hunt you down!"